The power of music is immeasurable, but I try to grab pieces of it and explain how they affect me.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Grief in Strange Places

The new Winnie the Pooh movie's trailer has been making me sad every time it comes on TV. I get that, lyrically, Keane's "Somewhere Only We Know" kind of fits the whole Pooh, 100 Acre Woods theme, but as soon as the music starts I'm wondering if this is the one where Pooh dies or at the very least, breaks up with Christopher Robbin.

But, there's more to why this gets me. Pretty much any Keane song puts a heaviness on me. I know part of that is just because the music itself is very melancholy, with those piano lines and his voice conveying a certain kind of sadness. But I also have an association with the sound that I will never be able to shake. See, I was listening to Keane during a time when I was coming to terms with my father's Alzheimer's. In particular, it was "Everybody's Changing," which fits lyrically, at least partially.

Life was changing for me, for him, for my mom, for everyone. It was a time when I felt the realities of growing older and having aging parents and loss looming for probably the first time in my life. And it didn't feel right. There's one verse that really sums it up:

You're gone from here
And soon you will disappear
Fading into beautiful light
Cause everybody's changing
And I don't feel right

There's a difference between sadness and grief. One is a state and the other is a process. Grief is a complicated thing to go through and involves deep reflection and introspection that is very different from depression. It sometimes involves a whole set of emotions, that may include sadness, but also nostalgia, anger, regret, hope, you name it. Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago is an album that I feel is actually embedded with grief, and I may have to write about that in a future post. But for me, these Keane songs bring up grief, even though it may not be in the songs themselves. They don't necessarily make me teary, but when I hear them now, it triggers something in my throat and in the pit of my stomach that is unmistakable.